from December 20, 2010 prayer update

Merry Christmas from the McDaniel family! May your Christmas this year be focused on the One that left all the benefits of heaven to make God understandable to us and then to die as a substitute in our place.

Twice each year our ACMC staff gathers at Pioneers headquarters in Orlando for several days of interaction. Last week was one of these gatherings. It is always an encouragement and benefit to be with my colleagues from across the U.S.

We had the opportunity to interact with Pioneers’ U.S. president, Steve Richardson. It was helpful hearing his perspective on what is happening around the world among unreached peoples where Pioneers missionaries labor to initiate church planting movements. And we interacted with Steve Shadrach, mobilization director for the U.S. Center for World Missions. Steve is keenly aware of the heartbeat of young adults in this country and how to effectively engage them in the task of world evangelism. We also devoted a session to interacting around David Platt’s excellent new book, Radical (my best read of 2010).

ACMC is about to begin its 36th year of service to local church mission leaders. We are distinct from most missions mobilization organizations in that our focus is on engaging local churches, not individuals. The local church in the U.S. has changed radically since our formation in 1975. The birth of the mega-church. The spread of seeker focused churches. The rapid expansion of charismatic churches. The decline of mainline churches. The birth of the house church movement in this country. And the recent missional church movement. Among many other noteworthy changes. Because of these changes, ACMC has changed as well. And we will continue to change going into the future.

Under the leadership of Pioneers new VP for church resources, Denny Spitters, ACMC will make a priority in 2011 of seeking God regarding our future as an organization. Our sense at the front end of this process is that our mission will remain unchanged -- “ACMC helps churches mobilize their resources for effective involvement in world evangelization”. However, we will be developing a new vision statement. We will re-examine our core values. We will likely sharpen the focus and scope of our mission. And we will consider what methodologies will best serve us in accomplishing our new vision moving forward.

Please pray for our task force which will be grappling with these issues in early 2011. We will be enlisting the involvement of an outside facilitator, Matthew Ellison with 16:15, to assist us in this process. Our hope is to be able to sign off on this work at our next staff gathering in late June. And then begin the important work of realigning what we do in each of our areas of service around what God reveals through this process.